


Whitecap Violence

by sigo



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alien Planet, Armitage Hux Has Feelings, Armitage Hux Needs A Hug, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren Fluff, Blow Jobs, Chancellor Armitage Hux, Come Eating, Come Swallowing, DOTF-verse, Duel of the Fates, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, Hand Jobs, Idiots in Love, Kylo Ren Being a Little Shit, M/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Porn, Porn with Feelings, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Sharing a Bed, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, There was only one bed!, Touch-Starved, Vacation, as fluffy as these two get, except hux is unfamiliar with the concept, l'exile et le royaume, not beta'd we die like hux and kylo did in TROS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 15:55:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28584585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo
Summary: When Kylo had first wanted to bring Hux along, Hux had protested. Bad enough that the Supreme Leader was always off galivanting planetside somewhere. The Chancellor should stay on Coruscant. Kylo would hear none of it, and here Hux was.//Chancellor Hux accompanies Supreme Leader Kylo to a remote planet in the Outer Rim at Kylo's request, and has a new experience that leads to a freeing revelation
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 18
Kudos: 119





	Whitecap Violence

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, no trigger warnings for this one. It's basically fluff. Just with two evil men who conquered a galaxy.

Great gusts of salty wind scratched against the viewports in the meager light of the morning. The speeder shuddered, fighting to keep its path, tipping nauseatingly as if floating across a sea. Hux looked at Kylo impassively, at his big hands clasped on his knees. There was a healing abrasion on the knuckles of his right one — he’d struck something recently. A fit of anger that Hux hadn’t witnessed. Hux pondered that, rolling the shape of it between proverbial fingers. It had almost certainly happened while they were apart, Kylo off to the furthest reaches of the galaxy on some arcane errand. When Kylo came home to Coruscant he kept Hux close at hand, hardly leaving him alone in the city no matter what Hux’s obligations were. Kylo’s fits of rage came less and less often as the galaxy was conquered.

_ What was it that got to you? _

Kylo made no answer, though he almost certainly heard the question. Hux’s eyes moved up, cataloguing Kylo’s plush mouth and large hawkish nose, his honeyed-tea eyes. The purple scar bisecting his features at an angle. Kylo’s face wasn’t twisted in a sulk. That was new. Perhaps not new entirely, but new to Hux. It seemed Kylo Ren was a different man on remote planetside missions, which until now Hux had abstained from. He hadn’t set foot on a planet outside the Galactic Core since Crait, and he supposed he hadn’t actually put boots down on the earth there.

A species of native fly with gleaming purple-green wings had gotten into the transport at the docking station, and it circled feebly now around the windows of the speeder. Oddly, it was silent, coming and going with trembling soundless movements. Perhaps the fly was cold. Hux certainly was, even in his coat. This planet had seasons, and he’d been told it was wintertime now. Pesky. Everything about planetside missions was unpredictable and  _ pesky _ . It was why Hux had spent so long on the Finalizer. Truth be told, he’d prefer it still. But there was an empire to tend. Hux looked at Kylo’s hands, and felt Kylo watching him, and the transport rolled and pitched.

Mineral fog surrounded the speeder. Pink salt hit the windows in fistfuls as if hurled there by invisible hands. Holes of light opened up in the void occasionally, baring unusual white trees or crystalline formations growing up into the sky like transmission towers. These spectral visions tilted toward the windows and then disappeared again into a deluge of pale pink salt. Hux felt he’d been travelling in silence for an age, yet the speeder had only been advancing two hours that cold morning over the rocky, desolate plateau that would eventually take them to some outpost or another Kylo had selected, for reasons he did not deign to share. In the beginning the land had extended in straight lines as far as Hux could see, but then the winds rose and swallowed that vast expanse, leaving nothing. It made the day seem like a sleepless night. Hux thought that this weather would sand him down to bone if he stood in it unprotected.

“Hux.”

Hux snapped back to alertness, his eyes rising to the level of Kylo’s face once more. “Yes, Supreme Leader?”

Kylo scowled. “Cut that out. It’s just the two of us.”

“Gladly.”

“What were you thinking just then?”

“Are you losing your touch?”

“I want you to tell me in your words.”

“I was thinking…” Hux’s eyes flickered again to the salt raging against the viewports. “...that fifteen years is an age.” Hux fought the urge to raise a hand to one of his temples, where his copper hair was going white of late. “And that it’s no time at all. It seems only yesterday we were both stationed on Ilum together, overseeing construction.” Hux never spoke Starkiller’s name aloud. It was too painful, though he’d designed myriad other projects since then. The transmissions blockade that all but sealed the victory of the First Order, for one. But there was nothing that matched Starkiller.

“I’d have thought this place would remind you of Crait.”

“Mm.”

“It doesn’t.” Not a question.

“No.”

“It tastes like Crait. Salty air.”

Hux felt his mouth quirk up, and Kylo smirked softly too. He was getting tiny lines at the corner of his eyes, the same way Hux was, though he was five years younger. Perhaps the Force took a toll on him. They smiled at each other, the lines that might eventually become wrinkles mirrored between them, a point of sameness. A point of humanity. They had little of that to speak of, Hux thought.

He pulled his coat shut more tightly, tugging the collar up against the chill. He’d had no expectations, but this trip still managed to disappoint him. When Kylo had first wanted to bring Hux along, Hux had protested. Bad enough that the Supreme Leader was always off galivanting planetside somewhere. The Chancellor should stay on Coruscant. Kylo would hear none of it, and here Hux was. It wasn’t precisely that Hux had grown overly comfortable in his three rooms at the top of the Capitol Tower, decorated with a hundred different trinkets and pieces of furniture and colorful hanging textiles Kylo had foisted upon him. He suspected he would feel like a stranger in that place a while longer, too used to the sparse life on a Star Destroyer even as the years passed by his Coruscanti balcony. Hux’s true objection was on behalf of the First Order. He believed that Kylo’s behavior as Supreme Leader showed his true passion lay not with the Order at all, and that disquieted him, though he could not say exactly why. It wasn’t as though it was a shock. And after all, it was to Hux’s advantage: Kylo’s disinterest in his empire afforded Hux complete control in all but title, and provided a greater opportunity to usurp him, when the conditions were right.

From this trip, Hux had expected searing heat and the sun beating down on him in some stars-forsaken desert or insect-infested jungle. He’d expected to burn up an ugly red and sweat through his clothes. Hux hated to sweat. He had not anticipated the cold or cutting wind, a nearly polar salt plateau. Just when Hux thought he could take the wail of the wind around the shape of the speeder no longer, the sound halted. They passed into a walled city, hovering down a long stone street flanked by pink adobe buildings. Shops below and apartments above, by the look of it. Dirt-streaked windows or else just slatted shutters and colorful beaded curtains festooned the dwellings. The transport stopped at Kylo’s signal. Hux was vaguely alarmed to hear Kylo give the driver an order in a guttural tongue Hux did not know.

Hux exited the speeder and, once he stood in the street, felt unsteady. There was a copse of those strange white palm trees in a planter in front of a spice market, and he wanted to walk over for a closer look, but refrained. The palm leaves looked pearlescent even under the overcast light of the salt storm. In sunlight Hux wondered whether these plants would shine. A local passed him by without looking at him, skirting around him like a statue. They wore a hooded cloak and a facial covering against the cold, only the dusky purple skin around their eyes visible. Though it was close to noon, the cold of the day was sharp. Kylo conversed with their driver again in that grating language, no doubt securing their luggage. Hux suddenly felt his exhaustion more acutely.

“I’m going in,” he told Kylo, not waiting for a response. He walked into their dwelling-to-be, perhaps a hotel. The bronze protocol droid behind the counter greeted him in basic, a relief, and led him upstairs with creaking, ill-maintained joints. They moved along a hallway with wide inward-facing balconies looking down over a courtyard. A brick fountain spewing multiple levels of flames instead of water lay at its center.

The room Hux was left in was furnished with only a double bed -- iron bed frame, woven mattress, quilt folded neatly at the foot of it -- and a rush screen. Hux wandered around it and took in the toilet, sink, and large bath all covered in a fine layer of pink salt. He felt the cold emanating from the room’s bare adobe walls. He didn’t know what to do with himself. The two options were to stand or lie down, and to shiver either way. Hux stood looking out one of the narrow slits that passed for windows. He waited without knowing why, only feeling the penetrating cold and his own solitude. He was so infrequently alone anymore, always surrounded by wheedling senators and emissaries, and yet he was always lonely. Almost always. Hux supposed he hadn’t yearned for alternative company on the flight here or in the transport with Kylo. Kylo was good for that much.

Hux dreamed standing up, barely hearing the sounds coming in the open-air windows from the street below. He listened beyond those noises, to the sound of the wind outside the walls of this city. It could almost be the murmur of water, the voice of the wind like that of seawaves. Hux closed his eyes and imagined the dark and towering cliffs of his home planet, and the waves crashing against black sand far below. The cold bothered him less. How many years since he had last seen Arkanis? Perhaps he would go. There was nothing and no one there anymore he did not wish to see.

The door to the room opened, and Hux turned back toward it. Kylo carried each of their bags under one arm, having no doubt brushed off any attempt by hotel staff or droids to serve him. Not befitting of a Supreme Leader, but Hux could sympathize. They shared a preference for control. Kylo set the bags down at the foot of the bed.

“We’re both here,” he said gruffly, and Hux raised an eyebrow at him. “Could be worse. It’s not camping.”

“Only by the strictest definition,” Hux said, glancing at the bed again. It seemed frightfully intimate now in this bare room. “They can’t possibly be full up.”

Kylo shrugged.

After washing up, they went down to the dining room. Everything seemed rather syrupy in pink adobe and violet silk. There was a painting on one wall of a beach with a twirling spire of a lighthouse. Hux thought that any beach must be far from here. The arched windows let in spare light today.

There were sentients in the dining room, seated at tables and booths, conversing in their language unknown to Hux. He observed their subtly striped skins in shades from indigo to palest lavender, and large lamp-like eyes. Layered desert robes with shaggy fur trim. Baubles made of beaten bronze. Hux did not believe this planet had ever held representation in the senates of old, and he knew they did not now, in this age of power. He wondered whether war after war had passed them by entirely, until now. Whether any of them realized the significance of the two human men who had just entered the room. Perhaps in the planet’s capital, someone would. Not here. Not in this liminal space Kylo had spirited Hux off to.

Kylo beckoned Hux to a seat and conversed with a waiter, who brought them crusty bread and curry. Kylo stopped Hux from drinking the water. “It’s not boiled.” He poured out two servings of the carafe of dark red wine he’d ordered and offered Hux that instead.

“We’ll be drowsy. It’s noon.”

“Loosen up.”

“Have you got a plan here?”

Kylo grunted, tucking in to his food, tearing his bread apart and sopping up curry with it. Hux managed a few bites. The spices were unfamiliar. There was something almost sweet about it. He longed suddenly not for Order rations, but for food from Arkanis. Squid fried in a sauce of its own ink, the sort with the bright red tentacles. Poison if not cooked properly, but Arkanan chefs triumphed over nature’s snares. Hux set down his spoon and drank deeply of his wine, pondering this surprising homesickness. He had always considered space his home more than any planet, at least in the forefront of his mind. It was this blasted planetary business. Armitage Hux so seldom walked any earth that a barren salt flat made him long for the fogged pine forest and whispering eelgrass of the world which had spawned his mother, and himself, and a trillion others moving back into the depths of time with eyes like pale green sea-glass and hair like burning embers.

“Caf,” Hux said, coming back to himself. “Would you order some caf?” It nagged at him, to have to ask Kylo this favor, though it was freely given. Kylo even seemed pleased. Hux realized belatedly this was a strategy he had employed with many inferior officers: ask for something small and endear the person to you by thanking them for completing it. Hux did not thank Kylo, but Kylo’s good humor lingered.

The caf came in a disposable cup, and Hux carried it with him out into the cold, trailing in Kylo’s wake. Kylo wandered the market stalls, lit by paper lanterns as the sky darkened. Hux followed him, feeling out of place in his black wool coat. He’d have blended in better in this place if he brought colored clothing like he wore on Coruscant. Not that Kylo truly blended in, here or anywhere. It was only that he made himself unseen by the way he carried his huge black-robed frame. Kylo was at ease, his posture routine, his step quick and purposeful. They walked through a park planted with more of those gossamer trees and Hux indulged himself a close look at one, raising a hand to touch one broad leaf. It curled away from him at the brush of his gloved fingers, raining salt grains down to the dusty earth.

They passed through shops and squares, Kylo speaking with merchants. There were more fire-fountains in courtyards, and Hux warmed his hands at one, leaving Kylo to whatever inane whim had brought them here. Kylo stood inside the nearest shop, the building painted a powdery blue. Inside, behind a counter of gleaming wood one merchant sold tea, raising and lowering a copper pot with a spout above little golden cups. Another sold loaves of bread so dusted with flour or sugar that they, too, seemed polluted by salt. Hux turned back to the fire, looking at the flickering color of it. Blue down close to the blackened jets it poured from, then bright yellow-orange. It was a gas flame. Archaic. Hux could hear the jet of it like a steady sigh, and thought he could smell it faintly too. The wind slowed.

Something dropped in front of Hux’s face, a weight around his neck, and he startled until he realized Kylo’s bulk was behind him. Hux grasped the thing Kylo had just put on him -- a thin beaded necklace of deep red and black.

“Is this a gift?” Hux asked incredulously, rolling a bead between finger and thumb.

“Better than socks on Life Day, isn’t it?”

“A waste of your credits.”

“Let me decide that. Come on.”

They walked together through little streets. The wind dropped into nothing and patches cleared in the sky above. Wells of deep blue. Along the earthen walls of the city, purple in the shadow of sunset, hung decaying winter flowers and dried-up fruit. A scent of earth-salt and coffee, fragrant spices and the odor of smoke floated through the air. The shops dug into niches of wall grew further apart. Just when Hux was going to suggest they call an end to their wandering, Kylo turned around. He’d picked up on the thought before Hux voiced it. It also meant Kylo didn’t have a goal in mind this evening, which was irritating.

They returned by another street toward the center of town, stopping briefly again in the hotel’s courtyard to warm their hands by the fire-fountain. Their room upstairs was likely to be as cold as the dark open streets. “There’s a fort outside the city. An old Empire outpost.”

“What could you possibly want there?”

Kylo bit his lower lip and released it. “Have you ever looked at the stars?”

“I only lived among them for the first thirty-six years of my life, Ren.”

“Do you want dinner?” Kylo asked, and Hux shook his head, eyeing the set of stairs at the end of the courtyard that might lead to the roof. He’d rather have a bath.

The bath was dissatisfying, the water lukewarm in a freezing room, and Hux abandoned it quickly, scrubbing himself dry with a scratchy towel and shivering under the quilt on the bed. He was a bit chagrined to find that he had in fact adapted quickly to a soft bed on Coruscant. The woven mattress here felt like a slab of stone. Eventually Kylo came in, smelling faintly of more wine, and his presence helped. He might as well have been a space heater, and he made the bed warm enough for comfort.

He fell asleep quickly, leaving Hux to toss and turn and listen to the noises coming in the thin windows. Distant city-sounds, the sort that Hux was too high up to hear on Coruscant. The nearby cry of some pet animal wanting back into the family home. Market-sounds, merchants’ voices and the clink of cookware in restaurants. Wooden doors opening and closing in the alley.

Hux was unused to sharing a bed. Or a room. He catalogued Kylo’s breathing, focusing on it over the racket of the outdoors. Steady inhale and exhale, the occasional hitch that might become a full-fledged snore as Kylo aged. There was another sound in the room, but not one Hux heard with his ears. It was something else, something indefinable that set Hux on edge. A mute call to be dismissed or received, but which Hux would never understand unless he answered it now.

Hux rose softly and stood motionless, attentive to the pattern of Kylo’s breathing. An advantage of a hard bed: he’d hardly displaced it in leaving. The warmth of the bed flowed out of Hux and chill replaced it. His nipples pebbled up. He pulled his robe on, and his slippers. Neither were rated for anything colder than the Finalizer. He crossed the room to the door and waited there in the darkness, and then opened it slowly. The latch seemed to turn forever, and then finally clicked free. Hux slipped out into the hall and closed the door soundlessly behind him, and then pressed his ear to it and listened for Kylo’s breathing. Still steady.

Hux turned, meeting the icy air in the hallway head-on, and then made his way down and out into the night. The air burned his lungs. He was half-blind in the darkness. He entered the courtyard with its burning fountain and took the stairs up. They did indeed go to the roof of the hotel, and Hux mounted the final step with a little jump and came to stand before a parapet. He was breathing hard. His exertion in climbing the stairs had not warmed him. Cold, glittering light filled the dark sky above. For an instant, Hux did not know what it was. Then the truth struck him.

He’d never seen stars on Arkanis, for the clouds never lifted there. They looked so different here than from the viewports of ships or from the Coruscanti capital. There were very few lights in this place to compete with starlight, and so the sky seemed streaked with maddening swirls of purple and blue between glinting diamonds.

Hux’s teeth were chattering, but he could not turn back. He leaned his whole body against the parapet, incapable of tearing himself away from the void opening up before him. In the sky above him there was a slow sort of gyration, thousands of stars being formed in the depth of that unceasing space above. Sparkling icicles slipping imperceptibly toward the horizon as the planet turned. Hux turned with it, and in his core of his being he felt the cold and sparkling waters of the night and hot molten desire collide. It seemed to Hux that he had ascended to this place and suddenly found something waiting for him that he had always longed for. In his heart, something tight and unyielding was severed all at once, unspooling slowly. He had spent all the years of his life fleeing fear, and in this instant he stopped and embraced it.

“ _ Oh _ ,” Hux said, the sound wrenched out of him. One white, frozen hand clasped the beads round his neck. “Oh, Ren you twit.”  _ He dragged me all the way out here for _ … For what? A courtship?  _ Would you have ever seen it otherwise? _ Hux’s own mind scolded him.

He and Kylo both were more at home in space than on any planet. Raised there, grown there. Rootless. They served no one else anymore, the free lords of a strange new kingdom. The thought filled Hux with such a vast well of feeling that he closed his eyes against it, swallowing roughly. He felt that this empire which he had built -- which he had built at Kylo’s side -- might never truly be his except in this fleeting moment. This moment, with eyes closed, in which Hux did not age or die. But he must open his eyes again. Trembling, he did. And so what would he do now, besides drag himself forward unto death?

He began by dragging himself back to bed. He was breathing badly, aware that his limbs were far too cold and his forehead too hot. It had been folly, going out in the frigid weather so poorly dressed. Planets were dangerous in ways that no Star Destroyer was. Hux could lose a few toes. It would be a fair price for his idiocy. His blood pulsed without warming him. The room was cold as ice, but when Hux burrowed back into the quilt beside Kylo he found the bed warm.

“ _ Stars _ .” Kylo woke as if doused with cold water. Hux imagined it was rather similar, suddenly finding such a frozen body beside him. “Hux, what--?” Kylo’s hands were on him, Kylo’s bare hands on Hux’s bare hands. He wished he weren’t so cold, so that he could feel them better. So that he could memorize the touch.

“No one’s done this,” Hux murmured, squeezing Kylo’s hands back. “Not in a long time.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You went outside?”

Hux found Kylo’s hard shoulder and nuzzled against it. Kylo recoiled only briefly at the ice of Hux’s skin, and then enveloped him. Hux clung to him like a refuge, shivering. Hux spoke, but could hardly even hear himself. Silver-tongued words indecipherable between chattering teeth. With Kylo, that didn’t matter. Hux felt the touch of his mind, light, gentle. He was usually gentle with Hux these days. Gentler than he’d been even when Snoke had been alive to command him not to break Hux in twain. It was as if Kylo had transferred something to Hux by choking him one last time aboard the Supremacy, instead of taking something away, and now he could bear to hurt Hux no longer. Hux focused his addled brain, and thought clearly.

_ You need me, and I need you, but more than that you need to be needed. And I need to be needed. If there’s a love other than one in darkness, other than one intertwined completely with hate, it’s not a love I know or understand _ , Hux thought. He thought other things too, all of them things he could not say aloud no matter his temperature.

Kylo held him tighter, until Hux was not shaking from the cold. Hux found his voice.

“I went out and looked at the stars. I thought of you.”

Kylo’s dark eyes went shiny in the gloom. With unbearable sweetness, Kylo kissed Hux’s cold knuckles. Hux repaid the favor, softly pressing his lips against the abrasion on Kylo’s hand. Kylo kissed Hux’s wrist and was kissed in return, Hux mouthing at Kylo’s pulse. They traded affection that way, moving up. The inside of the elbow, bicep, shoulder, collar bone. Trembling kisses on throats, breath hitching. Jaw. Cheek.

“Hux,” Kylo said raggedly, and Hux silenced him by kissing his lips. They slotted together like puzzle pieces, each meeting the other perfectly. Whenever Hux had considered the possibility of this between himself and Kylo Ren before, he’d thought it might be violent. It almost certainly would have been, years ago, when they had vied for power instead of sharing it. But on this night they were soft with each other. Reverent. The only sounds in Hux’s ears were the waveswell of their breathing, the rasp of skin on the underside of the quilt as they moved together, the smooth slide of palms on a chest, on shoulders, of thigh on thigh, the quiet, soft movement of mouth on mouth that made Hux’s belly and thighs feel sort of loose and fluttery. Kylo tangled his big hands in Hux’s hair, kissing him more deeply, licking him. Consuming, or worshipping.

Hux trailed his hands down until he found Kylo’s length, hard and hot and throbbing in his leggings. Hux gripped him, and pulled back so that he could hear Kylo moan into the air instead of his mouth.

“I don’t know how you can sleep shirtless here,” Hux said.

“You’ve got far too -- ah -- far too much on,” Kylo admonished him, fumbling with his robe. “I want to put my mouth on you.”

An inelegant description, but… Hux didn’t need to see Kylo’s lips in the light of day to verify their perfection. Even if this room were in a cave underground, pitch-black, Hux could call Kylo’s image up in his mind, as accurate as a holophoto. “ _ Yes _ . That.”

Kylo made quick work of their clothes, tugging with his hands and with the invisible hands of the Force. He pushed the quilt up, covering Hux’s torso against the chill, and then splayed his thighs out with both broad hands and swallowed him down. Hux cried out, clapping a hand over his mouth belatedly, and Kylo was in his head. The room was cold but Hux’s body was aflame. Hux felt hard enough to burst, filled to the brim with the same sort of glittering kaleidoscope he’d witnessed on the roof. He felt Kylo responding to it in his mind, their thoughts twirling together, muddled like honey and citrus in the bottom of a courtesan’s cocktail glass. Hux tasted himself as Kylo’s mouth worked on him, the salt of skin and brackish musk of arousal. Hux gasped, eyes closing involuntarily when Kylo sucked on him.

_ I know what you want. Take it _ , Kylo goaded him.

“Coy, for you,” Hux breathed.

_ Fuck my mouth _ .

“That’s more like it.”

Hux threaded his fingers into Kylo’s hair -- those inky tresses far too long, not regulation. Hux had secretly wanted to cut it ever since the first time he saw the man’s helmet off, but this was nice. He gave it a tug to hear Kylo grunt, and then held him still and jerked his hips up, feeling himself hit the back of Kylo’s throat, feeling Kylo gag and swallow around him. Kylo adjusted himself, going up on his forearms and tilting his jaw, and then Hux slid further down his throat. Hux fucked himself up into that wet and willing mouth. It would be over quickly. He already felt the first sparks of orgasm building, nerves firing like shooting stars tearing a silver path downward across the night sky. Kylo’s hands dug into the flesh of Hux’s thighs, squeezing, encouraging him as he sought out his pleasure.

“ _ Fuck _ ,” Hux hissed, and came. Kylo swallowed once, twice. Hux released his hair. Perhaps Kylo wasn’t due a trim after all. It made for a good handhold. Kylo licked Hux clean as he softened, stopping when Hux winced from overstimulation, and then yanked the quilt down, covering Hux’s legs. Kylo knee-walked up Hux’s body and settled his weight on Hux’s hips, stroking his own cock almost lazily from root to tip. “Let me,” Hux said. There was a false start, and then Hux got the angle right, pumping Kylo at the rhythm he’d used on himself for years, having left casual encounters behind him when he made General rank.

“Look up,” Kylo said, his voice low and rich and warm. Hux did, meeting Kylo’s eyes in the blue night. “What are you thinking? I want you to tell me.”

Hux’s voice took on the hollow quality it did during his speeches. Kylo’s cock pulsed in his hand at that. “I told you that I went out and looked at the stars, and thought of you, Ren, but that’s not the whole of it. I thought of the slow anguish of living and dying.” Hux twisted his hand on the upstroke, making Kylo whine and arch his back. “Of me and you, living and dying. Our empire, living and dying. It will, someday. Power is fleeting, but.... I thought about waves, about the way they meet the shore ceaselessly, making and unmaking the face of the land. About how they leave their mark. Even when an entire ocean dries up, shells will be found for centuries. That’s what we’ll be. Salt and brine and whitecap violence.”

Kylo moaned and shuddered, painting Hux’s palm and wrist white. They sat together, Kylo breathing heavily and looking down at Hux with the same intensity he had for years upon years. Practically ancient history already. Practically yesterday. Never one to miss an opportunity, Hux raised his hand to his mouth and licked, tasting Kylo. Kylo grinned down at him. Hux supposed he shouldn’t find that grin charming, but then again, the same could be said of his own poisoned smiles.

“Room’s cold,” Kylo said, and it was true as their ardor cooled. They settled again fully beneath the quilt, Hux retrieving his robe but leaving it unknotted. He wanted Kylo’s skin against his. Kylo enfolded Hux in his arms again. It already felt so natural. Like they’d been laying this way separately in their own beds just waiting for the other to fit snugly next to them. Like it was something they could never refrain from again, now that they had matched themselves together.

“So what was it?” Hux asked, drowsily caressing Kylo’s scab-roughened knuckles.

“What?”

“Your hand. What made you do this?”

Kylo chuckled. “You didn’t want to come with me. Do you regret it?”

“Very much.”

“Oh?”

“I think I’m ruined.”

Kylo studied Hux in the faint light coming through the windows. “No, not quite,” he said at length. “I can do better.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hux, you idiot, Kylo's trying to take you on a date! (Kylo chose a backwater planet because that's the sort of place Han would whisk Leia off to on dates when Ben was young. It's straight out of the Solo book of romance!)


End file.
